A new bill, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (CISPA), is re-igniting the fight SOPA started. This time, however, there are new and worrying battlelines. According to Dan Rowinski of Read Write Web, “CISPA is different from SOPA and PIPA in that it’s…
The Supreme Court yesterday agreed to hear a case that may revise the law’s understanding of the First Sale doctrine, with significant consequences for publishers. The court will hear an appeal from California entrepreneur Supap Kirtsaeng, who was reselling textbooks on eBay purchased overseas to U.S.-based…
The Seattle Times ran a front page profile on Monday about a prolific writer whose stories are studied in college programs across the country. Junot Diaz has praised these stories in front of packed houses in New York and, despite dropping out of school after…
Over and over in the Department of Justice suit against Apple and five of the six largest U.S. publishers the defendants are said to be obsessed with one thing: pricing. Leafing through the DOJ suit, there’s no evidence that the publishers worried that Amazon, which…
“Talks to resolve U.S. and European price-fixing probes into e-books are heating up, with three international publishers inclined to settle the matter,” according to a Wall Street Journal report by Thomas Catan and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg posted last night. However, “Apple Inc., another target of…
Reuters is reporting that the Department of Justice is nearing a settlement with Apple and five of the Big Six publishers being investigated for collusion on fixing the price of ebooks. Mind-fuckingly, the purported settlement, according to the Reuters story, will be favorable to Amazon,…
Bad news, fellow publishers. We’ve been so busy fretting about Amazon’s tyranny, bookshop closures, and the rise of the ebook, that we’ve missed the fatal threat posed to us by Facebook. Wired reports that Zuckerberg et al have asserted trademark in the word ‘book’ in their…
A notorious copyright trolling firm has been resoundingly smacked down in court, much to the delight of bloggers. Righthaven was established in 2010 with the sinister aim of suing bloggers and other online writers — even users of forums — for using content from their…
Jane Friedman‘s comeback idea after she was deposed as head of HarperCollins was a good one, no? Open Road Media‘s basic idea was to simply put out ebooks of all those great books published before anyone had conceived of ebooks—because their contracts couldn’t possibly have…
“A former teacher is suing the Chicago public school district for more than $300,000, claiming administrators fired him in 2009 after a parent took issue with his memoir, entitled Gabriel’s Fire, which recounts his own relationship with a teacher in his youth,” according to a…
